and trousers of itchy cloth, a seaman’s jersey, stockings and seaboots. Over these went the oilskin coat and trousers, the latter insecurely supported by a single cord. On my head was the storm cap. Even this was disappointing: it was made of patent leather trimmed with imitation Astrakhan. There were flaps that let down over the ears or could be tied up on top of the hat like a deerstalker. Everything was unnecessarily ugly.
The manager was delighted at my transformation. ‘Now, sir,’ he said briskly, ‘if you would like to move about a little…’ I walked a few feet to get what he called ‘the feel’ of the things and the waterproof trousers fell down.
‘You will also require a trunk,’ said the manager. At this moment one of his assistants wheeled one in. It was the sort of trunk that stingy murderers use for the disposal of their victims; covered with bright yellow fabric and fitted with imitation brass locks, it gave off a gluey smell and was sticky to the touch.
I was sweating profusely, unhappy to be looking so ridiculous and miserable about the trunk.
‘I want a wooden sea-chest, not a trunk. That thing will fall to pieces if it gets wet.’
The manager smirked. He was accustomed to this kind of complaint. ‘The sea-chest is a thing of the past,’ he said, ‘are you expecting the fo’c’sle to be filled with water?’
‘As a matter of fact, I am.’
‘In that case,’ he replied rather stiffly, ‘you will no doubt want to take your own precautions. We will wrap these in brown paper.’
On the way back to Hammersmith, from the top of a bus I saw a magnificent trunk in the window of a shop that disposed of railway lost property. The trunk in the East India Dock Road had been an octavo trunk; this was a folio and the next day when I went to see it, I found that it even opened like a book. One side contained numbers of drawers intended for shoes and the other a big space for hanging clothes. It was blacker and grander than I had imagined. A small ticket said: ‘This trunk by Louis Vuitton for sale’, and underneath, more despairingly, ‘Must be disposed of’. I bought it for four pounds, and put my shore-going clothes and my pilot jacket, of which at the time I was inordinately proud, in the space once filled with Paquin dresses. Its small white label, Louis Vuitton. Paris. Nice. Vichy, with its false promise of more gracious living supported me through periods of homesickness and depression.
At about this time occurred the Business with the Caribou Skin Sleeping-bag. It took up a great deal of time that I could have spent more profitably in eating. One of my chief sources of information about life in sailing ships was Basil Lubbock’s Round the Horn Before the Mast. Lubbock, a tall, tough Etonian, had taken part in the gold rush to the Yukon; returning from the Gold Fields in 1899, he had shipped out of ’Frisco in an iron barque and worked his passage home before the mast. Among his possessions was a Caribou sleeping-bag for which he had given a pair of 12 lb. blankets ‘to a man who was camped alongside me at Lake Bennett, on the way into the Klondyke’. He described it as having been made in Newfoundland by the Indians from two caribou skins sewn together with the sinews of the animals. The following passage convinced me that I too must have a caribou skin sleeping-bag.
‘How delightful and cosy I felt turning into my sleeping-bag in the first watch, better far than a dozen blankets. Off the Horn the air is so moist that once one’s blankets are damp they never get dry again; besides which the iron side of the half-deck sweats awfully, and drops on to everything. But when everybody and everything else was wet off the Horn I would crawl into my bag, my underclothes wet, my socks dripping, I did not take them off as the only chance to get them dry was by the heat of my body, and in turning out again I would find my clothes dry, and my feet smoking hot, notwithstanding the wet socks.’
The demand for caribou bags had slumped since the Gold Rush of 98. I learned this after visiting the showrooms of half a dozen manufacturers of camping equipment. In most of them I was met with blank stares of incomprehension. True to type, the assistants in those of the better sort, being asked for something outside their experience, refused to admit the existence of such a bag. In the most elegant of Piccadilly outfitters I was told by a man in a tail coat who looked like an aloof penguin that he had not been made aware of the caribou, and I returned home feeling like a character in an undiscovered sequel to Alice Through the Looking-glass.
Mr Mountstewart suggested the Army and Navy Stores. I was naturally a little wary of him by this time, but he produced that most remarkable work, the Stores Catalogue, which was as thick as a telephone directory, and this, although it did not list caribou skin bags, hinted that even more extraordinary articles could be obtained to order. I therefore decided to pay a visit to Victoria Street.
The man in the department which dealt with camping equipment received my request very well. He had heard of the caribou and could see no reason why its skin should not be turned into a sleeping-bag.
‘I suppose we could get one,’ he remarked rather gloomily. ‘It’ll have to come from one of the Hudson’s Bay posts. We’ll have to barter for it but I’ll take your name and address and let you know.’
‘When will it be here?’ I asked anxiously; time was getting short.
‘It should be here in two years. They’re nasty things. The last one gave the man who slept in it anthrax.’
I thanked him and after looking up ‘Anthrax’ in an encyclopaedia in the book department, I gave up the struggle. I was content. I knew now that if I really wanted a caribou skin bag I could have one. Instead I bought from him a real camel-hair sleeping-bag of four thicknesses made by Jaeger. In 1956 the hair of the camel is as rare as the skin of the caribou and much more expensive. I used it until 1942, when an athletic Egyptian leapt into the back of the truck in which we were driving down from the Desert, and removed three large bedding rolls belonging to myself and two brother officers; mine contained, in addition to all my other possessions, the sleeping-bag.
When I returned home, I found a letter from the owner’s agents telling me to join the sailing vessel Moshulu in Belfast. She was the one ship I had never heard of, and none of the more popular works on sailing ships gave any information about her. Even Mr Mountstewart knew nothing. However, just before I left for Euston he telephoned me. ‘I understand,’ he boomed, ‘that she is extremely large.’
I crossed on the night steamer from Heysham and as we came into Belfast in the cold early morning I saw for the first time the masts and spars of Moshulu. By comparison the scaffolding of the shipyards, where riveting hammers reverberated about the dark bulk of a new Union Castle liner, seemed solid and rooted in the earth. The barque was invisible, but the four enormously tall masts, fore, main and mizzen, and the less lofty jigger mast, towered into the sky above the sheds of the dockside, not white as I had imagined them, but yellow in the October sunshine.
‘Anyone’s welcome to that,’ said the smooth young steward as he plonked a pot of Oxford marmalade on my table. ‘Nasty great thing.’
I did not have the strength to argue with him. All through breakfast I had felt like someone in a condemned cell and my knees had been knocking together under the influence of a nervous impulse which I had been unable to control.
On the quay when I landed there had been some competition among the waiting taximen for my Vuitton trunk. ‘You’ll be wanting
